The other rooms were much the same. Will was trying the window in one when he heard Jem shout that he should come quickly; he was in the last room on the left. Will made haste and found Jem standing in the center of a large square room, his witchlight shining in his hand. He was not alone. There was one piece of furniture remaining here—an upholstered armchair, and seated in it was a woman.
She was young—probably no older than Jessamine—and wore a cheap-looking printed dress, her hair gathered up at the nape of her neck. It was dull-brown mousy hair, and her hands were bare and red. Her eyes were wide open and staring.
“Gah,” said Will, too surprised to say anything else. “Is she—”
“She’s dead,” said Jem.
“Are you certain?” Will could not take his eyes off the woman’s face. She was pale, but not with a corpse’s pallor, and her hands lay folded in her lap, the fingers softly curved, not stiff with the rigor of death. He moved closer to her and placed a hand on her arm. It was rigid and cold beneath his fingers. “Well, she’s not responding to my advances,” he observed more brightly than he felt, “so she must be dead.”
“Or she’s a woman of good taste and sense.” Jem knelt down and looked up into the woman’s face. Her eyes were pale blue and protuberant; they stared past him, as dead-looking as painted eyes. “Miss,” he said, and reached for her wrist, meaning to take a pulse.
She moved, jerking under his hand, and let out a low inhuman moan.
Jem stood up hastily. “What in—”
The woman raised her head. Her eyes were still blank, unfocused, but her lips moved with a grinding sound. “Beware!” she cried. Her voice echoed around the room, and Will, with a yell, jumped back.
The woman’s voice sounded like gears grating against one another. “Beware, Nephilim. As you slay others, so shall you be slain. Your angel cannot protect you against that which neither God nor the devil has made, an army born neither of Heaven nor Hell. Beware the hand of man. Beware.” Her voice rose to a high, grinding shriek, and she jerked back and forth in the chair like a puppet being yanked on invisible strings. “BEWARE BEWAREBEWAREBEWARE—”
“Good God,” muttered Jem.
“BEWARE!” the woman shrieked one last time, and toppled forward to sprawl on the ground, abruptly silenced. Will stared, openmouthed.
“Is she . . . ?” he began.
“Yes,” Jem said. “I think she’s quite dead this time.”
But Will was shaking his head. “Dead. You know, I don’t think so.”
“What do you think, then?”
Instead of answering, Will went and knelt down by the body. He put two fingers to the side of the woman’s cheek and turned her head gently until she faced them. Her mouth was wide, her right eye staring at the ceiling. The left dangled halfway down her cheek, attached to its socket by a coil of copper wire.
“She’s not alive,” said Will, “but not dead, either. She may be . . . like one of Henry’s gadgets, I think.” He touched her face. “Who could have done this?”
“I can hardly guess. But she called us Nephilim. She knew what we are.”
“Or someone did,” said Will. “I don’t imagine she knows anything. I think she’s a machine, like a clock. And she has run down.” He stood up. “Regardless, we had best get her back to the Institute. Henry will want to have a look at her.”
Jem did not reply; he was looking down at the woman on the floor. Her feet were bare beneath the hem of her dress, and dirty. Her mouth was open and he could see the gleam of metal inside her throat. Her eye dangled eerily on its bit of copper wire as somewhere outside the windows a church clock chimed the midday hour.
Once inside the park, Tessa found herself beginning to relax. She hadn’t been in a green, quiet place since she’d come to London, and she found herself almost reluctantly delighted by the sight of grass and trees, though she thought the park nowhere near as fine as Central Park in New York. The air was not as hazy here as it was over the rest of the city, and the sky overhead had achieved a color that was almost blue.
Thomas waited with the carriage while the girls made their promenade. As Tessa walked beside Jessamine, the other girl kept up a constant stream of chatter. They were making their way down a broad thoroughfare that, Jessamine informed her, was inexplicably called Rotten Row. Despite the inauspicious name, it was apparently the place to see and be seen. Down the center of it paraded men and women on horseback, exquisitely attired, the women with their veils flying, their laughter echoing in the summer air. Along the sides of the avenue walked other pedestrians. Chairs and benches were set up under the trees, and women sat twirling colorful parasols and sipping peppermint water; beside them bewhiskered gentlemen smoked, filling the air with the smell of tobacco mixed with cut grass and horses.
Though no one stopped to talk to them, Jessamine seemed to know who everyone was—who was getting married, who was seeking a husband, who was having an affair with so-and-so’s wife and everyone knew all about it. It was a bit dizzying, and Tessa was glad when they stepped off the row and onto a narrower path leading into the park.
Jessamine slid her arm through Tessa’s and gave her hand a companionable squeeze. “You don’t know what a relief it is to finally have another girl around,” she said cheerfully. “I mean, Charlotte’s all right, but she’s boring and married.”
“There’s Sophie.”
Jessamine snorted. “Sophie’s a servant.”
“I’ve known girls who were quite companionable with their ladies’ maids,” Tessa protested. This was not precisely true. She had read about such girls, though she had never known one. Still, according to novels, the main function of a ladies’ maid was to listen to you as you poured your heart out about your tragic love life, and occasionally to dress in your clothes and pretend to be you so you could avoid being captured by a villain. Not that Tessa could picture Sophie participating in anything like that on Jessamine’s behalf.
“You’ve seen what her face looks like. Being hideous has made her bitter. A ladies’ maid is meant to be pretty, and speak French, and Sophie can’t manage either. I told Charlotte as much when she brought the girl home. Charlotte didn’t listen to me. She never does.”
“I can’t imagine why,” said Tessa. They had turned onto a narrow path that wound between trees. The glint of the river was visible through them, and the branches above knotted together into a canopy, blocking the brightness of the sun.
“I know! Neither can I!” Jessamine raised her face, letting what sun broke through the canopy dance across her skin. “Charlotte never listens to anyone. She’s always henpecking poor Henry. I don’t know why he married her at all.”
“I assume because he loved her?”
Jessamine snorted. “No one thinks that. Henry wanted access to the Institute so he could work on his little experiments in the cellar and not have to fight. And I don’t think he minded marrying Charlotte—I don’t think there was anyone else he wanted to marry—but if someone else had been running the Institute, he would have married them instead.” She sniffed. “And then there’s the boys—Will and Jem. Jem’s pleasant enough, but you know how foreigners are. Not really trustworthy and basically selfish and lazy. He’s always in his room, pretending to be ill, refusing to do anything to help out,” Jessamine went on blithely, apparently forgetting the fact that Jem and Will were off searching the Dark House right now, while she promenaded in the park with Tessa. “And Will. Handsome enough, but behaves like a lunatic half the time; it’s as if he were brought up by savages. He has no respect for anyone or anything, no concept of the way a gentleman is supposed to behave. I suppose it’s because he’s Welsh.”